This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Another day, another Guardian article.
I have no doubt that the IDF commits some human rights violations. But if the UN high commissioner for human rights is disturbed about reports of mass graves, the subtext to me is "this is another Srebrenica". And I am rather sure that Israel does not systematically carry out mass shootings of prisoners. The optics would just be terrible, and in the age where everyone has a phone with a FullHD camera and some fraction of IDF soldiers presumably do not want to see every last Palestinian dead, the inevitable backslash would negate a thousandfold any perceived strategic advantage by reducing the population of their enemy. Israel is dependent on the US, and US voters care about genocides which make the news, and anything involving Israel will make the news.
From reading the executive summary from MSF, you would think that Hamas is a collective hallucination of the IDF, who find it necessary to lay siege to a hospital instead of just walking in to the front door and asking if it would be possible to search the basement for the existence of any secret tunnels really quick before moving on, looking for further windmills to tilt against.
Mithridacy is the art of misdirecting by omission without telling outright lies, and of seeing through them by noticing what is only implied instead of stated outright. If there was not a single armed Palestinian on hospital grounds, that would strengthen the story by making the IDF attack on the hospital a war crime. The fact that MSF does not claim that explicitly makes it unlikely to be true. While artillery shelling always carries the risk of collateral damage, snipers generally see whom they kill. If IDF snipers were systematically targeting civilians (doctors, elderly, kids, etc), that would be outrageous and well worth mentioning. The fact that the article does not mention that suggests that at least the primary victims of the snipers might have been some of the hypothetical Hamas fighters in the hospital.
Likewise, if the bodies in the mass grave all featured gunshot wounds to vital areas, which would be a clear indication of mass executions, you can bet that both the "Palestinian civil defense teams" (I am always amazed at the level of benevolence Hamas has shown in handing key functions of the Gazan government to decent people instead of consolidating all of the power in their own hands ) and the Guardian would go out of their way to tell you about it. So the fact that they do not mention it is somewhat strong evidence that it is not the case.
Also:
So she has confirmed that there have been "multiple bodies" discovered, and also that some of them had their hands tied, but is still hedging on the total number of bodies claimed by Ham^H^H^HPalestinian officials? I would assume that if you have a trusted source in Gaza, you could confirm the latter quickly enough.
Also, I do not think that Hamas would lie about that. The Health Ministry numbers may be exaggerated, but they should certainly be able to find 310 bodies to put into that mass grave they discovered after two months. Or perhaps they legitimately found them and someone buried them afer the Nasser fighting.
More broadly, I wonder about the long term strategy of Israel. Assuming that Nasser was an important point of access for the Hamas tunnel system, they went in, smashed it, and left again? Why not occupy it long term, turning Gaza into an open air prison in earnest, with checkpoints and curfews, eventually establishing an alternative structure of government? Gaza is not exactly Afghanistan in size, after all. Going in, kicking Hamas a bit and then have them disperse hidden among the civilian refugees seems like it would cause a lot of civilian hardship without accomplishing the legitimate goal of wiping Hamas from the Earth.
I kind of wonder about that. The institutions that launder that sort of information into public awareness are to a large extent captured by people who are anti-Israel, so it's actually kind of questionable how many people they'd lose vs. the counterfactual by actually doing massive war crimes. A lot of the populace already thinks Israel's guilty of ethnic cleansing, and a reasonable amount have heard "Wolf!" cried enough times that they've tuned out and won't believe reports of massacres; there's just not all that much of the US meaningfully in play here.
"Ethnic cleansing" is so broad that I think Israel is doing it.
More options
Context Copy link
There’s also quite a lot of the public which simply does not care about savages in the desert somewhere and thinks that Israel is within their rights to wipe them all out since they can’t learn to behave.
More options
Context Copy link
I am as anti-Hamas as they come, but the moment the IDF goes full Einsatzgruppen on Gaze (like Hamas did on Israel), my sympathy level for the Israeli state will drop to similar levels as I have for Hamas.
If the government of Israel had wanted to genocide Gaza, the 'best' option would have been to turn it into a radioactive parking lot on Oct 7. It is not a 'great' option, there is a reasonable chance that the US would stay out of it if Iran attacked in retaliation (which it might), and wiping out a population with nukes might be harder than it sounds.
Of course, me-the-non-genocidal-voter would also be furious about that. I would probably support withdrawing all Western military aid until such a time as Israel has sent every singe person involved with the nuking decision to stand trial in the Hague and their military forces being put under the command of a less genocidal country which allows a Palestinian state in the West Banks, but I generally do not support genociding populations as reprisals for government action, which would be the long term outcome if Western support was just withdrawn.
From a would-be genociders frame of mind, it is always easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. If Hamas had killed their victims at a rate of 100 per week instead of most in a single day (which is not a realistic hypothetical for military reasons), I would basically have supported whatever it takes to stop the killing. In our world where their victims were already dead, fighting Hamas is still paramount, but not especially urgent. A slow genocide by IDF through mass executions would not be strategically sound for similar reasons: the backslash will stop the act long before you manage to murder a non-trivial amount of the population.
More options
Context Copy link
The media is solidly pro Israel as is the entire foreign policy establishment. If anything blind support for Israel is their prime directive and they ignore things Israel does in a way they wouldn't do for anyone else. The October 7th attack was lied about to an absurd extent, with stories of mass baby burnings and rapes that turned out to be as true as Saddam's nukes. Those stories were pushed hard by pro zionist media which is essentially all media. This report has more credible sources than those stories.
The media is also still regularly uncritically reporting numbers from de-facto Hamas controlled bodies such as the Health Ministry. The UN is likewise blindly trusted, despite the fact that they have been caught red-handed over and over at this point. There is a very strong zionist lobby with a lot of influence, but the media landscape as a whole is a mix of very different biases.
More options
Context Copy link
Do you count the Guardian as part of the media? That was the second most prominently placed story at the time I read it, if I recall correctly.
What about the German Sueddeutsche Zeitung, which reports roughly the same (even if I get a bit more of a balanced vibe from them as opposed to the Guardian)? I did not cherry-pick here, this was really the first source I checked (after stumbling over it on the Guardian, which I read for the math puzzles or something).
If I go to the NYT, paywall aside, or CNN, or BBC or god-help-me Fox-News, is your prediction that I will only will not have reported it because of their 'blind support for Israel'?
More options
Context Copy link
I mean, I did forget about the ADL, and that's my bad, but as you say they aren't in play either and so I think the overall issue of "remarkably little of the USA is actually movable by any potential Israeli warcrimes, because most of the populace either is already dead-set against Israel, is shielded from the information, or is so pro-Israel it'd still support it" still exists.
I am not so sure information doesn't matter:
https://www.pewresearch.org/2024/03/21/emotions-news-and-knowledge-about-the-israel-hamas-war/
Americans with the most knowledge about casualties are much more pro Palestinian. There is a major divide between young and old americans and that is probably due to getting info from pro zionist mainstream media vs those who get information online.
In large part the only Americans who care about Palestinian casualties at all are already pro-Palestine.
More options
Context Copy link
My point is: suppose Israel commits an atrocity. People who consume pro-Palestinian media will hear about it and be outraged, but they mostly already hate Israel so nothing's changed. People who consume pro-Israel media will just hear Israel's side of the story, as implausible as it may be, and therefore won't be outraged because they don't know it happened, so nothing's changed.
Sure, there are people who care about the truth, have a variety of sources, but are not either already pro-Palestinian or rabidly pro-Israel and thus can be flipped - those people are in play. But there aren't actually all that many of them.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You're thinking that it might be a case of, "if we're going to he accused of genocide for asking civilians to leave a combat area, we might as well commit some anyway to make it worthwhile?" Or more of a "just be less careful" sort of thing?
I think the “asking civilians to leave a combat area” is doing a lot of work when the whole territory (minus Rafa for now) is being reported as being a combat zone.
More options
Context Copy link
I honestly don't know what's going on or will be going on. I pay very little attention to the Israel/Palestine situation because I already know what I want to do with it (nothing) and because there's not much chance of it blowing up into Global Thermonuclear War (if Iran gets nukes and nukes Israel, I imagine that would suck for anyone in the region, but it's not clear how that turns into great-power arsenals flying).
Just saying, if I were Bibi I'd assume that mostly either the funding will be pulled or it won't and my war conduct wasn't super-relevant. It's not impossible that war crimes could affect the money tap, but it's hardly a clear deciding factor.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link